Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

https://economist.com/united-states/2026/02/12/alabama-offers-three-tricks-to-fix-poor-urban-schools

by andsoitis • 5 months ago

35 97 5 months ago

economist.com

eks391• 5 months ago

Paywall

FuriouslyAdrift• 5 months ago

https://archive.is/pbXg8

hollywood_court2• 5 months ago

It's good to see Birmingham finally doing something right. It so easy to become distracted by the corruption and the drama surrounding the water board at the moment.

alphawhisky• 5 months ago

Something something broken clock

gruez4• 5 months ago

Not really. The specific policies seem like plausibly good things, so you can't really dismiss it as "broken clock twice a day".

Three city programmes stand out.
The first tackled absenteeism [...]
Next, the district turned to preventing holiday learning loss [...]
[...] “Birmingham Promise”, a programme that pays full tuition at many Alabama colleges for graduates of the city’s public schools. [...]

b40d-48b2-979e2• 5 months ago

This is less "Alabama" and instead "one blue city in a red state making policy changes while the governer takes credit for it".

gruez4• 5 months ago

Look at the chart. Adjusted for "poverty rate and other demographics", the top states are red states, so it's harder to chalk it up as some sort of n=1 outlier.

fncypants• 5 months ago

What does that mean, "adjusted for poverty"? Reading level is an absolute. You're either at a third grade level or not. This adjustment seems to have no purpose other than completing a narrative that does not help solve the problem.

unyttigfjelltol• 5 months ago

Worse things in the world than retrospective bipartisanship.

hollywood_court2• 5 months ago

Exactly. The State of Alabama loves to make things are difficult as possible for Democrat ran cities. But to be fair, the Montgomery Democrats usually aren't much better.

swaits3• 5 months ago

Their solution is that you must read at a 3rd grade level in order to get promoted to 4th grade. It brought them from basically the worst State to the 30th percentile in reading for 4th graders.

So, common sense? If you’re requiring proficiency in order to promote, then I’d expect to see significantly better results than this.

It’s noteworthy that they’re still basically the worst in 8th grade reading and math. Might take some time for these literate 4th graders to get up to 8th grade age.

I don’t think Alabama is a model for anything related to public education.

b40d-48b2-979e2• 5 months ago

It's also noteworthy that they have some of the most impoverished populations in their schools in the entire country.

swaits3• 5 months ago

Yes, indeed. I should’ve mentioned that in my comment.

NietzscheanNull• 5 months ago

still basically the worst in 8th grade reading and math.

Doesn't that stand to reason? The changes described in this article have been in place for less than six years, so the earliest grade cohorts haven't yet made it to 8th grade!

In my opinion, it's very encouraging to see Alabama making the strides they've made so far.

swaits3• 5 months ago

Yes. I realized I should’ve clarified that and edited it into my comment in parallel with your comment.

HanShotFirst2• 5 months ago

I expected to see that in the article, but it's not mentioned at all.

CGMthrowaway5• 5 months ago

Their solution is that you must read at a 3rd grade level in order to get promoted to 4th grade

Can someone explain why we ever stopped doing that? It does seem like a lot of public school advocates these days push simply for graduate rate, to the exclusion of meeting common sense aptitude standards. To the point where it is having a downstream effect on universities having to tie up an unreasonable amount of resources on remedial education

kotaKat• 5 months ago

“No child left behind”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act

clarionbell• 5 months ago

From what I understand, in USA schools are accountable, and funded, locally. This puts more direct pressure on educators not to fail children.

Recently, there has also been a movement to drop standards based grading and advanced classes, under guise of equity. That I find more troubling.

ergonaught• 5 months ago

1) "Good idea, terrible implementation". Wrong incentives.

2) "They know the letter of the law, but not the spirit." No common shared understanding of the purpose/point/value motivations.

3) "Time marches on." There is a constant influx of new kids to educate and you can't realistically block the flow without rupturing something.

gwbas1c2• 5 months ago

Can someone explain why we ever stopped doing that?

Talk to someone educated in the 1950s and 1960s and you'll understand. There was always one or two kids in the class who were 2-3 years older than everyone else, because they frequently had to repeat grades. It caused a problem for them because they weren't with their peers, age-wise. (As opposed to the kid who was born too close to the cut-off and held back a year because they were just too young to start school.)

When I was in school, (1980s and 1990s,) sometimes kids who fell behind had to go to summer programs to catch-up. But, I was sent to private schools; children with special needs were sent to public schools that head the resources to handle them, and everyone was either from a financially stable family or otherwise knew the strings to pull to keep the kids in private school.

andsoitis• 5 months ago

Can someone explain why we ever stopped doing that?

big picture... people avoid telling others what their gaps are, where they're underperforming.

this empathy ruins people and, while it avoids difficult conversations, doesn't do the kid any favors. it is actually very unkind to the individual while the messenger protects their own comfort.

this pattern repeats it self in adulthood too.

orwin• 5 months ago

My country did the same. The answer is simple. Education research. Being one year behind isn't a big deal (and use not to be), but having a few 10-11 yo in the same class as 8 yo was detrimental to everyone. We then created special classes for people with learning disabilities, which is still detrimental to those kids, but at least the impact is limited.

Academic prowess shouldn't be such a social booster/crusher, especially pre-PhD, but it is, so we have to deal with it, and that mean not making kids repeat classes too much (two decade ago, it was max a year below 11, max two after that in my country, nowadays it's just avoided as much as possible).

ConceitedCode• 5 months ago

Recent essay and data the article is based on - https://www.urban.org/research/publication/states-demographi...

prodigycorp7• 5 months ago

Can someone steel man the reason for not teaching phonics? Among the different trends in teaching, de-emphasizing/abandoning phonics is counterintuitive, bordering moronic. But I do not claim to be more than a pea brain myself.

CGMthrowaway5• 5 months ago

When and where I was growing up, phonics was really only used remedially with kids who couldn't figure out how to read any other way.

prodigycorp7• 5 months ago

I don’t remember how I learned to read but having a toddler who I’m now teaching to read, phonics have been a nice hook for him to wrap his mind around what’s on the page. I’m sure he’d be cromulent at reading without it, but we read together a ton and I don’t see him reading as accelerated without it.

the_sleaze_3• 5 months ago

I'm here in Alabama, I'm teaching my kids reading through phonics at home about 2 years ahead of them starting in school. They're learning what they call "sight words" in class. My kids are so far ahead of the others that our specific teacher has now moved to teaching the rest of the class phonics and almost abandoning sight words altogether.

I think the rubber on the road reason for not teaching phonics is that it's _hard_ and requires genuine teaching - personal focus on a little kid's understanding. I can't imagine that scaling in a classroom but I'm no educator.

prodigycorp7• 5 months ago

Good job by you! It’s heartening to see a teacher willing to switch things up too.

I guess I didn’t consider phonics to be hard.. it seems self evident. But yeah, I also read to my kid a ton and have been throwing some phonics practice in there. I don’t know how else to give a toddler footholds to comprehend what’s on the page.

bmacho• 5 months ago

That's weird because 2 years of one-to-one study with their parent should matter more than whatever method, also teachers don't just go and give up their method, even for good reasons. And 2 years of one-to-one study with their parent being effective is not a legit reason to change methods.

justin664• 5 months ago

not teaching phonics

Teachers use phonics all the time. “Teachers don’t use phonics anymore” is just a thing people say. It’s odd.

ch4s311• 5 months ago

This is not really accurate. There was a vary long running debate about phonics which is 1 piece of a larger system (alphabetic coding, phonemic awareness, phonics, spelling, and comprehension) vs Whole language which became popular int he UK and US in the 1980s and 1990s. Whole language is junk pedagogy and doesn't work but was the preferred method taught to teachers for nearly 30 years in the US.

The NYT Daily podcast did an ok episode on this[1].

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aerQQFrBbPQ

bluGill2• 5 months ago

English is not really a phonic language. The is some, but the rules are not clear - why is phone not fone? Many letters can have more than one sound, and it is arbitrary which is chosen. Different English speakers even have different sounds / ways to pronounce a word.

Not that phonics is useless, but it isn't as helpful as it should be. We need spelling reform first - which probably needs to start with a more general spoken language reform, and that doesn't seem like it will get anywhere for political reasons.

prodigycorp7• 5 months ago

This makes some sense!

blargthorwars• 5 months ago

For me, phonics was a lifesaver. Sure, you have to learn a corpus of typically common words that don't follow the pattern, but that's ok. I went from functionally illiterate to loving language.

HanShotFirst2• 5 months ago

1) Reducing chronic absenteeism by more aggressive tracking and offering social and financial support for students who may have difficulties at home. 2) Adding more optional school days during breaks, including busing and school lunches on those days. 3) The third isn't explicitly stated. The article mentions free college for public H.S. graduates, but it's hard to see how that would improve reading and math scores much earlier in life. The article also mentions a switch to phonics education statewide, but doesn't dwell on how it affected reading scores. (My assumption is that it helps greatly.)

ch4s311• 5 months ago

the article also mentions a switch to phonics education statewide, but doesn't dwell on how it affected reading scores. (My assumption is that it helps greatly.)

It's actually more than phonics[1], but gets called that because people know what phonics is. Phonology, Sound-Symbol Association, Syllables, Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics are the broad categories, and it's all called structured literacy. This is contrasted with "Balanced Literacy", which was pseudoscience and broadly popular in the 1990s in US teaching. It's highly effective and evidence based.

[1]https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/evidence-based-science-of...

TimorousBestie4• 5 months ago

I’m very against financial incentives for perfect attendance. American schools by and large still do not have adequate ventilation and space to prevent the spread of contagious diseases. Combine that with a state like Alabama with low childhood vaccine rates and it’s a recipe for epidemics like measles.

wildzzz• 5 months ago

Birmingham had a chronic absentee rate of 29% prior to this program which is defined as missing at least 10% of school days. They brought it down to 14%. Missing class is a major detriment to learning and causes kids to fall behind faster than they can keep up. Doing nothing to combat chronic absenteeism is not really the solution to preventing the spread of childhood diseases.

TimorousBestie4• 5 months ago

Doing nothing to combat chronic absenteeism

Not something I was advocating, thanks.

ch4s311• 5 months ago

This might be the dumbest take I've read online in months. Alabama has had 1 case of measles in 24 years. Alabama requires MMR for entry to public k-12 schools and has a 95.3% vaccination rate which meets the accepted threshold of 95% for heard immunity. One minute of searching could have turned this up for you. But you're making up some stupid bullshit about "ow childhood vaccine rates".

Seriously, I can't fathom why you'd think the poorest students in Alabama shouldn't be receiving high quality in person education even in the face of imperfect ventilation. Talk about the perfect being the enemy of the good.

TimorousBestie4• 5 months ago

Alabama requires MMR for entry to public k-12 schools

For now. Your state legislature has multiple bills in progress to increase vaccine exemptions and reduce requirements, following the national trend.

and has a 95.3% vaccination rate

93.8% the year prior, see below. We’ll see if it’s an upward trend or an outlier soon enough.

But you're making up some stupid bullshit about "ow [sic] childhood vaccine rates".

Here’s a weighting of various vaccination metrics by state: https://www.newsweek.com/states-that-vaccinate-most-map-2127... (2025)

And a local report from a couple months ago: https://alabamareflector.com/2025/12/08/alabama-sees-lower-v...

The vaccination rate for children aged 13-17 nationwide remained high in 2024, but it drops significantly in Alabama as children age. Where about 70% of 4-10-year-olds are up to date on vaccines statewide, only 25% of children 11-18 years old are up to date.

And as I said to the sibling commenter, I’m not advocating doing nothing about absenteeism. It’s perfectly reasonable to criticize a specific method while endorsing its intended effect.

ZeroGravitas• 5 months ago

Note when they say "shot up the national rankings" they mean relative, since Alabama remained static on scores, but others slipped.

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g4_8/...

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g...

They might be better looking at what the states going down were doing and using that for (anti-) lessons as maintaining a score hardly seems like a rousing success for new initiatives.

ErroneousBosh• 5 months ago

"shot up the national rankings"

Also, y'know, not a phrase I would use with American schools.

Let's have less shooting eh?

ch4s311• 5 months ago

The sub headline is "Adjusted for student poverty", and is about reversing pandemic learning loss. The poorest students in the highest poverty districts in Alabama made significant gains since the end of the pandemic. You can see more detail here[1].

[1] https://educationrecoveryscorecard.org/wp-content/uploads/20...

bitshiftfaced• 5 months ago

I disagree. It shows that the policies that they put into place gave them resistance to whatever it is about the pandemic that reduced scores everywhere else. As the article laid out, Alabama didn't just keep doing the same things.

cestith3• 5 months ago

Two ways poor school districts could work on serving the kids are take some money from administration salaries to pay teachers and take some money from administration salaries to pay for breakfast and lunch for students.

mikkupikku3• 5 months ago

The latter will probably work much better. Good teachers get embittered and burned out through exposure to bad students (who are mostly bad because their parents are trash, and feeding the kids breakfast partially mitigates this.) Of course the teachers will tell you that paying the teachers more is the solution, but that doesn't seem to track with the evidence. Good schools, which are good because the students are good, tend to compensate their teachers less than bad schools. The teachers really aren't what make a school bad or good in the first place, and virtually no teachers start out being bitter assholes but are made to be that way after years of bad students. It's all downstream of social problems in the community causing kids to be raised poorly, and fixing that requires more nuance than just throwing money at teachers.

cestith3• 5 months ago

But you get the best teachers by requiring a Masters and paying $40k a year while your school has three assistant principals and your district pays six figures apiece to multiple assistant superintendents, right?

tstrimple• 5 months ago

I tend to think "good teachers" is a thing that doesn't really matter outside of niche 1-1 breakthrough moments. I know there are exceptions. Teachers who go way above and beyond, but that's not a scalable solution. A great teacher can make a difference in a handful of children. But they can't fix a fundamentally broken system. I tend to agree with you that it's not teachers that make a school good. It's the reputation and the parents who will move to areas based on said reputation. It's already selecting for parents who have the means and willingness to decide where they live to achieve better results for their child's education. They are invested in other ways as well.

Thus bad schools don't necessarily have bad teachers. They have a concentration of complacent or actively bad parents who drag the entire experience down for everyone. Throw in the bulk of special needs kids who fall on the public school system that is not in any way equipped to actually handle them and it's no wonder very few kids are learning effectively.

snarf21• 5 months ago

I read the article and would argue that it is really just two things they did. However, both things are really the same coin and are about solving poverty and almost nothing to do with education. Both are small (but positive) band aids on general food insecurity and housing insecurity. Amazing how having a known safe place to sleep at night and food to eat everyday helps kids live better lives.

All schools should have free breakfast and free lunch. Countless studies have shown that kids learn better when properly fed nutritious meals. Struggling schools near more after school and weekend programs with tutoring AND meals. These problems are fairly easy to solve and the cost is less than the status quo.

hyeonwho5• 5 months ago

It is interesting how much these interventions copy the absolute basics of what is done in Steubenville, one of the best performing low-income cities in the nation [1]:

- Get kids to school at all costs. Birmingham has lottery incentives. Steubenville has a staff member whose full time job is tracking down students and bringing them to school.

- Teach phonics, instead of the "Reading recovery" and cueing methods made popular by extensive marketing in teacher training programs. (And consequently popular in Blue districts.)

- Have lots of people teach reading. Birmingham uses college students as tutors. Steubenville uses ALL teachers (including phy-ed, art, music) and volunteers.

- Have more school. Birmingham does summer sessions, Steubenville does free pre-K.

Steubenville's preK programs teach grammatical sentences, the alphabet phonetically, and prereading.

The Steubenville schools sort reading classes by student ability rather than grade level, so that stuggling classes can be smaller and those students can get closer to one-on-one attention. They famously consistently get to third grade with no students reading below grade level. It is more expensive per student, but they make up for it with fewer students repeating grades.

So a lot of this falls under the category of "stops you can pull if you really want to," but the methods that have evidence showing they work [2] are not profitable for publishers, so teachers don't get trained on them. They also require teachers to carefully follow a script, which is boring and rubs against idealism.

[1] https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2025/02/20/sold-a-story-e...

[2] https://www.successforall.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/SFA...

ch4s311• 5 months ago

The debacle of instituting "whole language" instruction should be viewed as a great national shame.

cowpig• 5 months ago

You can explore data directly here:

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ndecore/xplore/NDE

I plotted a bunch of random states and created a line chart showing the progression since 2017. I chose to look at Math scores, since that's most objectively measured. I am not trying to "adjust for demographics" because that just makes it easy to derive whatever result you want.

Some obvious conclusions from playing with the data:

* Everybody is worse off compared with pre-pandemic. The best-performing states seem to be doing worse compared with 2019

* Puerto Rico is a total disaster outlier, and Massachusetts clearly outperforms the rest of the states.

* There doesn't appear to be any other clear "winner"

The only conclusion I think you can draw from the data the article describes is that Alabama and Mississippi are poorer, and so if you adjust your data by $$ they move up more.

marysminefnuf• 5 months ago

teacher here. there is a huge reason why we dont use reading levels to promote in michigan. its unfair to hold a third of the kids back because of biology. the kids develop early on in elementary school rapidly and kids born at the end of the year from september to december will always be a few months behind in development. unsurprisingly, the current statistic we have is that 1/3 of our 3rd graders are illiterate according to our state. not just having trouble reading, but cannot read at all. that tracks in my classroom, but we're getting better about it as the year progresses. Ive found that reduced screen time is the best way to get kids literate again in my homeroom.

insane_dreamer• 5 months ago

Not a single state, including Alabama, has improved their 8th grade reading scores in 2024 vs 2019, and 38 states are worse in 2024 than 2019.

And math is much worse. 51 of 53 States* have worse 8th grade Math scores in 2019 than 2024. (Again, not a single state improved.)

My biggest takeaway is that it is in-person teaching, in the classroom, that actually helps kids learn, _not_ spending on "edtech".

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g...

(incl DC, PR, military)

Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

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